Tying HR to organizational mission and values

- Strategic HR increases an organization's ability to achieve its vision, mission and strategic objectives. So you've got to connect your own activities to them as well. Let's say you work for a small tech firm who creates apps focused on health and nutrition, and the organization's vision statement is to make lives better. So your HR vision must be to make lives better for your employees. Perhaps you do that with your employee wellbeing initiatives, flexible work, competitive vacation time and stellar learning opportunities. All things that make employee lives better. And as your workforce's lives are better, they'll put that positive energy into making customer lives better. If our firm's mission is to promote a healthy lifestyle through a wide range of well designed apps, it must also be your mission to promote a healthy lifestyle internally. Perhaps that includes a yoga and exercise room, healthy food in the cafeteria and making a nutritionist available as a benefit. Finally, review your organization's core values. If one involves excellent customer service, then your core value in HR is providing excellent customer service to employees. If another is innovation, you should be doing some innovative HR stuff. So review your organization's vision, mission and core values, and ask yourself how you can apply them to yourself and your HR responsibilities. Where are you excelling and what are the opportunities for improvement? Also ask yourself what activities you're working on that help the organization itself meet its vision and mission, and where you are lacking. Where could you be stepping in to drive the organization towards its goals? In addition to connecting to the vision and mission, you should also focus on demonstrating return on investment or ROI for your activities. This means that the investment in something has a return greater than the investment itself. It either makes money or saves money. Take training, for example. If your company loses 30% of customers within the first three months of signing on, your company is also losing money, let's say $200,000 in revenue. Convince the CEO to spend $10,000 on customer service training, save 1/2 of those customers, and keep $100,000 in revenue. The cost of training was 10,000 and the return on that investment was 90,000, or 100,000 minus the cost of the training. So I also want you to start looking at how you can prove the cost of your ideas and activities is either saving money or earning money. Moving forward, make this a regular practice.